Published 4:00 am, Sunday, October 19, 2003

With just more than two weeks until the Nov. 4 election, the San Francisco mayoral race has turned into an all-out sprint for second place.

Even the other candidates see Supervisor Gavin Newsom as the odds-on favorite to win the election, but unless he gets more than half the votes, which recent polls say is unlikely, he'll face the second-place finisher in a Dec. 9 runoff contest.

"Newsom is going to finish first because he spent two years and $2 million to get there," said Tony Winnicker, a spokesman for city Treasurer Susan Leal, a rival candidate for mayor. "Once you have a runoff, though, it's a whole new ballgame."

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That leaves five other big-name candidates scrambling for the chance to challenge Newsom and succeed Mayor Willie Brown, who is barred by term limits from running again. And it means the front-runner is no longer the lone target.

Supervisor Matt Gonzalez lobbed one of the first charges with a new campaign mailer that highlights his differences with the more moderate Newsom on six Board of Supervisors votes intended to appeal to the city's left -- and matched himself against a fellow progressive, Supervisor Tom Ammiano.

Of the carefully selected issues, Ammiano and Gonzalez agreed on only one,

their opposition to selling naming rights for Golden Gate Park.

With Gonzalez, Ammiano and former Supervisor Angela Alioto fighting for the vote on the left, Gonzalez said the intent of his campaign mailer was to separate himself from the other candidates, whom he called "an incredibly weak field."

Speaking to The Chronicle editorial board Friday, Gonzalez described Ammiano, the former board president who lost to Brown four years ago, as "a progressive who, in many respects, has had his opportunity."

It's important to point out his differences with Ammiano and Alioto, Gonzalez added, because "progressives are trying to decide who to vote for."

Ammiano backer upset

Robert Haaland, president of the Harvey Milk Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club and a longtime Ammiano supporter, fired off an angry e-mail to The Chronicle on Friday after getting the Gonzalez campaign mailer.

"This year the left is split and angry," he said. "This year feels destructive and the mailer . . . is just more evidence of that bloodbath that has occurred."

The mayor's race already has had more than a typical share of strangeness.

First, the likely December runoff election was never supposed to be a possibility. Last year, San Francisco voters approved a plan for an instant runoff that would have let voters designate a second and third choice in the November balloting and used a system that tossed out losing candidates until a single candidate had captured more than half the votes.

But problems in the city's troubled elections department and with the company tapped to provide software for the innovative voting system forced the city to scrap plans for the instant runoff election.

California's unprecedented recall election also stopped the mayor's race dead in its tracks. For more than two months, the state's political attention was turned toward the spectacle of movie action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempt to oust Gov. Gray Davis from office. In San Francisco, the mayoral candidates kept talking, but until Oct. 8, the day after the recall vote, no one seemed to be listening.

"A lot of people are tuning in now that we've moved out of recall oblivion," Leal said.

TV debate sparks interest

The mayor's race was reignited Tuesday night with a televised debate that gave many voters their first real look at the people seeking to run San Francisco's government for the next four years.

That television exposure, along with the daily rituals of shaking hands at city bus stops, giving speeches in supporters' living rooms and showing up to answer the same questions at San Francisco's panoply of political, ethnic and community clubs, has made a difference even for the candidates at the bottom of the polls.

"At least, people know who I am now," said Tony Ribera, a former police chief and the lone Republican among the major mayoral candidates. "I'm very well received when I'm out there campaigning, but I don't know how that translates on election day."

With Nov. 4 in sight, the candidates now have to find their supporters and make sure those people get to the polls. With the field tightly bunched behind Newsom, "the field operation of a campaign is what's going to separate the winner from the losers," said David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voter Education Committee. "The winner is the one who make sure his supporters vote."

In a tight race, endorsements become a type of political shorthand, letting voters know where a candidate stands by showing their supporters.

That's why Leal is touting her backing from a variety of local women's groups, along with the endorsements of Assessor Mabel Teng and Supervisors Fiona Ma and Sophie Maxwell, the top elected women in the city.

Newsom has the backing of many of the area's top Democratic leaders, including the mayor, while Alioto grabbed the brass ring for the city's progressive left by getting the endorsement of the Bay Guardian weekly newspaper.

Four years ago, Ammiano had the Bay Guardian's backing. He has the front page of the paper's endorsement framed in his City Hall office.

"The Bay Guardian endorsement was very important for Angela, who has been out of public office for eight years," Lee added. "It reconnects her with a younger generation of progressives."

The Ammiano campaign has sent its signature mail piece, titled "Experienced Leadership for a Livable City" to about 100,000 targeted voters. It has a "Top 10" list of bills he's passed and new proposals he supports.

Hunter Cutting, a spokesman for Ammiano, said a new mailing is going out to neighborhoods where Ammiano found the strongest support in his 1999 campaign against Brown -- the Mission, Bernal Heights, the Haight and parts of the Inner Sunset and the Excelsior.

Alioto said her campaign has targeted 282 precincts where she did best in her last run for mayor in 1995.

"Every one of those precincts will be walked four times before election day," she said. "I'm personally walking eight of my own precincts."

Alioto said her volunteers will be dropping off door-hangers that focus on the differences she has with Newsom. She's also planning a television commercial that will focus on her promise to bring together the city's warring political factions.

While polls show Leal running fifth, she's confident she can win a slot in the runoff. Ammiano, Gonzalez and Alioto are chasing the same voters, she said, which opens up the race for a candidate with more broad-based appeal.

"I can run well in Pacific Heights," one of the city's wealthier neighborhoods, as well as in the working-class, progressive Mission," Leal said. "I don't scare the business community, and I don't scare the far left."

Groups that endorsed the candidates also are stepping up their support with mail, ground troops and phone calls to voters. Alioto is getting a lot of support from the health care workers union, Gonzalez is getting help from the Green Party, of which he is a member, and Ammiano has the backing of environmental groups, some of whose endorsements he's sharing with Gonzalez. One of the first items to arrive in voters' mailboxes: a postcard from DogPAC, which advocates more off-leash areas for man's best friend, touting Gonzalez's candidacy.

For most of the campaign, Newsom's front-runner status has been a virtual bull's-eye, drawing constant fire from the other candidates. But while some of the pressure may be off, at least for the November vote, the supervisor knows he's a long way from becoming the city's next mayor.

"There's going to be a runoff," he said. "We have no illusions about that. But we've been talking all along about running a 110-yard dash, not a 90- yard dash."

Newsom has visited nearly 450 house parties thrown by supporters, often visiting as many as four a night. He's running what he called "a very aggressive" phone bank effort, with callers each night dialing voters across the city, including those from San Francisco's foreign language communities.